Weekend predictions: The Suicide Squad headed for $30-million-or-so weekend
August 6, 2021
The Suicide Squad should easily win the weekend at the box office as it goes up against Jungle Cruise (playing in its second weekend), and… not much else. After July’s relative banquet of new releases, August will be more modest in scope, and The Suicide Squad looked at one stage as though it might have had the month almost to itself. Although its recent tracking has been more muted, its Thursday preview numbers point towards an easy win this weekend. This might be the only weekend it tops the charts though.
Before getting into the final prediction for the weekend, here’s what our model said before we had news of the preview figures.
While the DC Universe hasn’t been quite as huge at the box office as that other super-hero franchise, it has reliably produced hits over the years. The first Suicide Squad opened with $133 million back in 2016, and the first four films in the franchise all managed to debut over $100 million. Things have declined since then. In fact, even before the pandemic, all six films following Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice opened to lower numbers than the movie before, with Birds of Prey opening to $33 million just before theaters shut down.
Our model doesn’t care about trends very much because they tend not to be very predictive. But it does think that the MPA rating of a movie is significant, and so pulls in Deadpool and Logan as comps. Once films like that are taken into account, an opening around $90 million would be on the cards for The Suicide Squad under normal circumstances.
Using the model’s current multipliers, that should translate into an opening around $57 million.
Thursday’s preview results suggest something less impressive…
DCEU movies have tended to make about seven times their preview total over opening weekend, although there have been a lot of variation between installments. The $4 million in previews for Birds of Prey seems like the most relevant number here, and points towards an opening weekend of around $33.8 million. If we take the median figure among all the movies, we land on an expected opening weekend of $28.2 million, which is what I’m using as our prediction this week.
That number is almost exactly half what the model would expect given its current evaluation of the overall market and the expected debut for a DCEU film. So, what’s going on? Are people not showing up for this movie because it’s on HBO Max? Is it that the worsening situation with the pandemic is deterring people from going to theaters? Or is the film itself just underperforming? I suspect it’s a combination of all three factors. One things for sure: it’ll provide fuel to whichever fire a given pundit is tending at the moment.
Hopefully The Suicide Squad does better than its preview numbers suggest. $30 million certainly seems on the cards given the multiplier for Birds of Prey, but it’ll need to go well beyond that to keep the overall market from declining this weekend.
I’ve expanded our list of predictions here at The Numbers to eight films this weekend because we now are consistently getting at least that many titles earning $1 million over the weekend. That’s a good sign, but unfortunately all those films aren’t contributing enough for the market to be growing as a whole. For that, we need films like The Suicide Squad to earn $50 million or more over a weekend, or films like Jungle Cruise to fall less than 50% in their second weekend. Sadly, neither of those things are happening at the moment.
Unless something significantly out-performs today’s expectations, we’re looking at another down weekend for the market.
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Filed under: Weekend Preview, The Suicide Squad, Jungle Cruise, Marvel Cinematic Universe